Women, Work & What Stinks

Ooh – I got all excited. See this – from BRW talks about gender and salary and worth and work. All things I’m interested in, as are many women.

Here’s the nub of it:

The moment a woman becomes a mother, her value drops at work. When she returns from maternity leave, she will find her first child has eaten up around 4 per cent of her salary – at the same time that daddy’s star begins to rise.

Subsequent children increase the “motherhood penalty” to 9 per cent.

While some of this is due to taking on less demanding work (willingly or unwillingly), it is mostly to do with perception.

Men with children are thought to be more committed to their careers, are offered higher salaries and are given more leeway if they are late to work. Women, at the same time, are expected to have slipped off the fast track and onto the “mummy track”, even when they believe they are as committed as ever.

A study of managers from Macquarie University finds that men earn an extra $2000 to $5000 per year for each child, where women with similar background and experience lose $2000 to $7000 per year per birth.

What this shows is the power of the old fairytale of male breadwinner and the “little woman” or “her indoors”. But with women now the main “breadwinners” in nearly 40 per cent of Australian households according toRoy Morgan and National Australia Bank, these role models are well past their use by date.

So the exciting thing is, I’ve written a story that sits inside this context.

It’s called Unsuitable.

It’ll be along real soon.

Here’s the blurb:

She works in a man’s world. He’s inspired to do a job considered a woman’s.